There is an interesting insider account about Bittorrent's troubles over at Valleywag as well, definitely worth a read. Valleywag published some sort of analysis of Bittorrent's troubles as well, but it probably shouldn't. Owen Thomas wrote yesterday that the FCC decision to slap Comcast on the wrist for its Bittorrent filtering "killed Bittorrent's promising business." From his post:

"As for BitTorrent's content-delivery network, it was premised on the notion that BitTorrent would negotiate with ISPs to get privileged delivery for their file-sharing packets, while Comcast blocked others. With the FCC forcing Comcast to treat all file-sharing traffic equally, the promise of that business evaporated."

That's just silly. The FCC forced Comcast to do something the company has been promising on its own since March: Switching to a protocol-agnostic type of network management. The ruling didn't even change Comcast's timeline, giving the company another four months to compete the transition. So how is this going to harm Bittorrent Inc?

Owen's argument that a move to metered bandwidth would make Bittorrent downloads look bad to consumers also doesn't make any sense. Metered bandwidth makes any large media file download look bad, period.